Wednesday marks the first day of the rest of Brooklyn’s life.
That’s when the Empire State Development Corporation holds its sole hearing to allow the public to vent — and do little else — about Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards mega-development.
If Ratner’s massive, 16-skyscraper, arena, housing and office space development is allowed to take root, hundreds of thousands of people will forever be affected. Yet the ESDC has allotted just four hours — in the middle of summer — to allow the public to share its concerns.
One public hearing is all the agency is required to do by law — and it is certainly doing little more (an unpublicized “public forum” was added for Sept. 12 — but scheduling it on the night of the Primary Election, when active members of the community will likely be otherwise engaged, is just another bit of ESDC cynicism).
Not even the “required” Wednesday hearing was widely publicized by the ESDC.
We’re not surprised, of course. All along, the ESDC has tried to discourage public review, analysis and discussion of the Ratner project. That’s the only plausible explanation for its release of a highly technical, 2,000-page draft environmental impact statement for the project while many people — and all three affected Community Boards — were on vacation.
And for scheduling the sole public hearing for Aug. 23 — just 36 days from the release of that 17-inch-thick document.
And for closing the public comment period after just 66 days.
If the project had been analyzed under the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, rather than the State Environmental Quality Review procedure, the public review would stretch into months, not weeks.
Even people who analyze DEISes for a living said the timeframe was far too short to properly consider all the impacts and proposed mitigations of those impacts. Those experts have since been joined by elected officials who have called for a longer analysis period.
Some of those elected officials — like Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and Assemblyman Roger Green (D-Prospect Heights) — are supporters of Bruce Ratner’s vision.
When even a developer’s allies argue that more time is needed to assess a project, it’s pretty clear that the review process needs to be decelerated.
Taken together, the ESDC effort amounts to a crime against democracy.
Hundreds of people are expected at Wednesday’s hearing at New York City Technical College between 4:30 and 8:30 pm. Brooklynites deserve to discuss the largest development project in their history with more time than it takes for dinner and a movie.
